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• Monday, January 5, 2009 04:04 PM

  Harpie, one more thing about the <blockquote> tag here

  Although the advice give you is sound, there is one more quirk to Salon's neolithic HTML parser that you should be aware of. The Salon Parser (SLP) introduces a paragraph tag for each hard carriage return in the text. However, after a <blockquote> tag SLP, for some unknown reason eats the first hard carriage return (presumably with some fava beans and a nice chianti). This is only important if what you are blockquoting has more than one paragraph. Thus if you type:

  <blockquote>First Paragraph.
  Second Paragraph.
  Third Paragraph.</blockquote>

  what you would expect is

  First Paragraph.
  
  Second Paragraph.
  
  Third Paragraph.

  but what you will get is

  First Paragraph.
  Second Paragraph.
  
  Third Paragraph.

  There are a couple of workarounds for this. You can use two <br> tags (forces a line break) in addition to a hard carriage return after the first paragraph:

  <blockquote>First Paragraph.<br><br>

  Second Paragraph.
  Third Paragraph.</blockquote>

  will get you

  First Paragraph.
  
  

  Second Paragraph.

  Third Paragraph.

  However a much simpler workaround is simply to put a hard carriage return after the <blockquote> tag. Thus

  <blockquote>
  First Paragraph.
  

  Second Paragraph.
  Third Paragraph.</blockquote>

  gets you the same thing.

  The SLP simply throws away the first carriage return no matter where you put it after the <blockquote> tag so if you put it in front of your text it doesn't care.

  Sorry if this is more than you wanted to know about <blockquote> tags.

  —Frankly, my dear, ... Read Frankly, my dear, ...'s other letters
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